These are the pictures taken by an unforgiving regime of the men, women and children caught trying to escape its suffocating clutches and then forced to re-enact their ordeal for the cameras of the secret police.

'Reenactment MfS' - the Ministry for State Security better known as the 'Stasi' during the 40 year existence of the East German state - is a new book containing these photos of desperation which the socialist rulers used as evidence in the show trials against those they caught.

They were also thought to have been used for training purposes for border guards and trainee agents intended to inculcate in them awareness of the lengths people would go to in order to try to escape the workers' paradise that was the German Democratic Republic.

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Foiled: The Stasi - East Germany's secret police - forced people to pose for their pictures, showing exactly how they had planned to escape from the German Democratic Republic

Humiliation: The families were forced to line up and pose for the pictures, which were used as 'evidence'

Lessons: The photographs were also used to train up border guards, so they knew what people might try to do to escape the confines of East Germany

Hidden: These pictures were found in the archives of East Germany's Stasi secret police, presumably the clothing of someone who had tried to flee the Communist regime

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But photographer Arwed Messmer, who discovered the pictures, sees another reason for the pictures of families desperate to escape the grasp of East Germany.

'Of course when I saw these photos of families for the first time I was reminded of Abu Ghraib,' he said, referring to the prison in Iraq where American gaolers humiliated their prisoners for amusement and captured the images of their degradation on camera.

Messmer found the remarkable photos in a box at the Stasi Archive in Berlin, where mile upon mile of yellowing paperwork - the files of the secret policemen which they managed to neither burn or shred in the East German state's dying hours - now reside.

Together, they constitute a fascinating if grim epitaph to a nation which erected the Berlin Wall to hermetically seal in its citizens.

One of the photos shows a man sitting in a homemade raft made out of polystyrene slabs, nylon rope, and wooden boards.

He was transporting it to the Baltic Sea near the East German resort of Boltenhagen on July 9, 1981, when he was apprehended, tried and flung into prison.

Simple: A picture of a ladder, which some desperate person had used to try to escape to the West

Creativity: The ingenuity of people trying to escape was remarkable: one picture shows a girl hiding in a gearbox compartment, while others simply show the vehicle in which they tried to make their escape

Evidence: Other pictures, like these blood stained tops, look more like a picture which might be taken by police for use in a court case today

Another is of a primitive float constructed out of a car tyre inner tube, a fan motor and car battery. The craft was assembled by a man who worked in a factory which made Trabant cars.

He intended also to sail from Boltenhagen to get to the west on June 26, 1989.

But he was apprehended before he hit the shoreline and also ended up in jail.

Collection: All the pictures have now been brought together in a book by the photographer Arwed Messmer

One of the more poignant photos shows a young boy standing outside a car with its boot open, his sister forced to lie inside, just as she was found when their car was stopped at Checkpoint Bravo in Berlin as it headed west on September 12 1983.

It is believed the children were sent to a Stasi orphanage, their mother arrested.

Also caught in the cold glare of the Stasi photographic lens was an East German family and their West Berlin escape helpers, Oliver Mierendorf and Karlheinz Hetschold, who tried to smuggle them west in an Opel car on September 21, 1973.

The ingenuity of the people smugglers knew no bounds. One of the photos shows a young girl lying in the gearbox compartment at the front of a Peugeot 403 on September 9, 1965, as two U.S. soldiers attempted to get her through the border to the west.

Tunnels, people caught in vans, others caught in car boots as well as models of the Stasi HQ speak from the pages of the book: silent witnesses to an unforgicing system which killed hundreds and imprisoned thousands more before it imploded in 1989.

Messmer said: 'Many of these pictures were surely made within the kind of standard crime investigation routine you can find all over the world.

'In these reenactments I suspect that the East German authorities wanted to at least keep up the semblance of the rule of law, by giving state prosecutors visual evidence, even if a later trial verdict was already pretty certain at the time of arrest.

'I would say that the humiliation caused by this form of documentation was more like collateral damage, and that it was accepted as simply part of the process.'